DIY Miniature Room in a Box (part 1)

 

I thought it would be a good idea to have a full tutorial on how I make my minature doll rooms because I have so many things relating to that on this blog. In this post, I'm going to talk about how I chose the box for my room, and adding wallpaper and flooring. Basically, this is the base for every room you make. You can change every one of the details in this to fit your needs and style, so get creative!

To start, your going to need to make the actual room. I'm using a shoebox, which I like because you can close it which makes it easy to store. You can also use a regular cardboard box, a cereal box, or glue together peices of cardboard. When you are choosing a box, keep in mind the scale of the furniture and people you want to use in it. For example, this box is much to small for my monster high doll. You can also change the orentation of the box for different heights.

When you open your box, you want it to stand up easily. I used the lid as one wall of the room.

Once you have a base ready, it's time to start making it look like a room. I am going to add a floor to my room, but it might not be neccessary depending on the box you are using. I cut a peice of cardboard to the size I want the floor to be, making sure it fit inside the room.

I glued cardboard on the bottom to even it out, as some of the floor is overlapping with the shoebox and some is not.

You don't actually need to connect the floor to the box, but I did. I used a strip of packing tape to connect one end of the floor to the side of the wall. It can fold to fit inside the box when you close it.

Time to make the floor look pretty! You can buy or print scrapbook paper that looks like wood floor, but I am going to make my own. If you want a tile floor instead, use graph paper. To make a wood floor, I'm using a regular paper but it looks better with brown paper. Rub crayons on their side accross the paper to add texture. I did mine over a floor with some wood texture so it would transfer to the paper.

Glue the decorative paper on top of the cardboard floor using a regular glue stick. You may need to use multiple sheets of paper or trim your paper to get full coverage.

The walls get the same treatment as the floor. I'm using white for the walls because thats the paper I have, but doing other colors and patterns looks great. Trim the paper to fit then use a glue stick to glue it to the wall. 

If one sheet of paper does not cover the whole wall, use another and slightly overlap them.

The finishing touch is the baseboards, which are optional, but really bring the whole thing together and hide imperfections between wall and floor. I cut strips of this flat white foam this time, but you can also cut strips of cardboard and then cover with paper.

Use hot glue to attatch the base boards to the wall. Make sure they are lined up with the floor.

If you want, decorate the outside of the room too. You can glue on colored paper like the inside, details with different colors of paper and other 3D objects glued on. I did not decorate the outside of the box.

Thank you for reading this far, I hope you found it helpful or at least enjoyable! Remember that you can change lots of details of this project to be more toward your vision. Stay tuned for part two when I talk about furniture and decorations!